


Planning for a Thesis

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-29 21:57:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7701247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blair plans his Masters thesis</p>
            </blockquote>





	Planning for a Thesis

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'ambition/ambitious'

 

Planning for a Thesis

by Bluewolf

Blair read steadily through the book he had found in a second hand bookstore earlier in the year.

It was an old book, printed in 1870, that he had bought because he hoped it would give him an insight into the differences between then and 'now' in anthropological attitudes. Instead, he found much more.

Richard Burton seemed to be atypical for his era - he seemed to be a man who was born long before his time; a man who was genuinely interested in the people he met and who didn't consider their customs, way of life and - yes, laws, 'primitive', to be destroyed and replaced by the 'more civilized' laws, religion and day-to-day life of the invading white men.

And this book - The Sentinels of Paraguay - was very informative about the way of life of the Paraguayan tribes in the nineteenth century.

Every village had its chief, its shaman (despite the enforced Christianization of the country during the three centuries before Burton's time and the Church's view of a shaman as a heretic), its general population... but most of the villages also had a man Burton called a 'sentinel'; a man who seemed to hear and see more, scent and taste things more easily than everyone else, who helped the shaman identify illness by touching the sick person... a man who acted as watchman for his village, warned the people of approaching bad weather or - worse - approaching enemies, helped the men find the animals they hunted more easily, found the sometmes surprisingly intact carcasses of animals killed by predators that probably planned to return to their catch later to eat from it again. So much that they could do... but although Burton did not say much about the downside of heightened senses, there was a downside. It seemed that a sentinel could lose touch with reality by concentrating too hard on one sense. Burton did mention in passing that all sentinels had a friend who appeared to help him, but he gave no details about how that help was given.

The theme of sentinels fascinated Blair.

After finishing The Sentinels of Paraguay, he began to spend more and more of his time in the library, searching for books contemporary with (or following) Burton, to see if any of them spoke of men with apparently heightened senses, but finding that they didn't; most were more intent on finding new plants (or animals) that (of course) would be named for them when they took specimens back to their native countries. The people were mostly dismissed as ignorant savages by men who couldn't have survived on their own in jungle terrain.

Abandoning the apparently useless attempt to find mention of sentinels in any other book, Blair took time to think about heightened senses.

People with heightened senses would still be of considerable value to the handful of tribes still living a hunter-gatherer life, but in the controlled environment of 'civilization'? What use would heightened senses be? There were mechanized early warning systems to warn of approaching attacks by hostile countries, long-term weather forecasts to warn of bad weather, hunting was a hobby rather than a necessity, food was farmed, processed, then sold in supermarkets, there were all kinds of blood tests for disease...

But wait...

There were firms that manufactured perfume, and regularly put out new fragrances - how were those identified? Or blended? By people with a particularly strong sense of smell? Firms that sold coffee or tea... and put out different flavors... New blends identified as good and tasty by people with a strong sense of taste? What about top-of-the-range sportsmen - baseball players whose average batting scores were really high, golfers who regularly scored below par in competitions - did they have better than average eyesight? Musicians - did they have excellent hearing?

He needed a subject for his Masters thesis. Could he make a study out of that for his Masters? The use some people made of stronger-than-usual, top-of-the-range senses?

Blair realized it was an ambitious project, one that would involve a lot of speaking to people rather than gathering many of his facts from already-published books and newspaper reports, but if he could pull it off...

He could lead in with Burton's sentinels as an extreme example, and then go into details of how modern man could - and did - use senses that were at the top end of the scale. Certainly it would be to earn a living, and wouldn't be of survival value to their communities - people could live perfectly well without perfume, tea or coffee - but...

He settled down to make a list of tea, coffee and wine manufacturers, and top sportsmen... Once he had that, he could think about how to contact them and questions to ask about how they worked...

Yes. He had a subject for his Masters thesis... Now to see if he really could pull off something that involved interviews, not just reading...


End file.
